This Retro Video Game Just Raised More Than $300,000 On Kickstarter

Instead of cramming into a tiny apartment to build a game, the co-founders of Yacht Club Games can now afford something a little nicer thanks to its campaign on Kickstarter.

The five developers just wrapped up a campaign in which they raised more than $300,000 to develop a game called “Shovel Knight” — a retro-looking game that’s a bit of a love letter to the era of the original Nintendo. The team originally sought to raise $75,000 on the site.

The game is basically built entirely around the mechanic of stabbing things below the character on screen with a shovel, co-founder Sean Velasco said in an interview. Think back to games like “Super Mario” or “Duck Tales,” where the character would bounce off the head of enemies to beat them. And like many early video games, Shovel Knight will be hard.

It’s a nice success story for Kickstarter, a site that lets smaller development teams raise money to build apps, such as weather-tracking app Dark Sky, or gadgets like the plug-in thermometer Thermodo, without having to seek out other forms of funding like venture capital fundraising.

It’s also a good place to test the waters for an idea to see if there’s actual interest, co-founder Velasco said.

We caught up with Velasco and and two other developers on the Yacht Club Games team — Nick Wozniak and Ian Flood — to find out more about the game, and what it’s like raising money on Kickstarter. Here’s an edited transcript of the conversation:

WSJ: What is the background of you and your co-founders?

Sean Velasco: There’s about half a dozen of us. I’ve been at [game developer] WayForward for six years, and others have been there for a while. We really enjoyed working together as a team, so we wanted to do the Yacht Club thing so we could continue working as a team on projects that are original as opposed to licensed.

WSJ: What’s your history in game design?

SV: We’ve been doing a few things before that. Really “Shovel Knight” had only been an idea since December of last year. We worked on various projects, different members of the team. I directed “Double Dragon Neon” and “BloodRayne: Betrayal,” and “Batman: The Brave and the Bold,” and “A Boy and his Blob” on the Wii. I was the assistant director on Contra 4.

Nick Wozniak: I also worked on “Double Dragon” and did some work on the Thor movie game for the DS that came out recently. I was also on “A Boy and his Blob.” We’ve all been kind of working together for a while in the same circles.

WSJ: Why make a game? The business is terribly competitive.

SV: I’m not sure if there was another option. I don’t know what else I would do with myself if I wasn’t making games with this team.

Ian Flood: I mean, if the task was to make a weather app, I’m sure it would be a weather game.

SV: We’re not trying to get rich. Really, all we want to do is make really awesome games and have a really awesome team behind it. We’re a small team, we don’t have huge overhead costs, and we’re indies. We’re able to branch out and make things a little more creative that a giant publisher wouldn’t go for.

Yacht Club Games

The Yacht Club team behind Shovel Knight

WSJ: What’s the inspiration for this game?

SV: We basically asked, what can we make around the “down-thrust” of “Zelda 2. “Duck Tales” also has a down-thrust, even Mario has a down-thrust that you don’t have to activate. It was from there that we shaped the rest of the gameplay. You flip a guy over, you can down-thrust his stomach to get his weak point vulnerable.

And, well, everyone has a sword, so what else can you do — so it became a shovel. “Zelda 2″ is a major influence for the combat — the level design is very “Megaman” and “Capcom.” The way the screen transitions work, it was important for us to get that right, all that stuff is very classic NES but with our own twist on it. It’s also hard, the tension is built from the way games like “Dark Souls” create a value system and serious consequences when you die. If you die in “Dark Souls,” you lose all your souls, you can’t progress without that. That’s what appeals to us, death affects a player and the way that they value things in the game.

WSJ: So why Kickstarter? Are you guys confident you can actually deliver a game?

NW: We were pretty confident we could get ourselves funded. We had to act as if we were going to be funded anyway. We thought this was a good way to market it, make it a grassroots campaign, get people involved with their families and their friends, and we saw a lot of success with people being very effusive with their praise.

SV: We’ve been so entrenched in the game industry for a really long time, we have a very good idea of how to scope a project and how much work a project is gonna take, and how large something should be in order for us to do it in a specific amount of time. We already know online play is difficult, certification processes take a long time and developing games is really expensive. We were able to use that to better inform our Kickstarter campaign. And as long as you’re upfront, your backers will be okay with it.

The Shovel Knight “down-thrust.”

WSJ: How long did it take to exceed your funding goal?

SV: We had two weeks to go out of four, we got the goal, but then it started accelerating after that. You can look at the curve, it just shoots up at the end. That’s largely because of the large amount of press we did by going to Penny Arcade Expo and getting that demo into peoples’ hands and letting people play it. If we could get to $150,000 that would be really comfortable.

WSJ: Where does that extra money going?

IF: It would go into hiring a different QA team, hiring a visual studio to do localization. It’s very rarely straight-up hardware.

SV: There is definitely equipment — for example the office. If we funded a really small amount we would have to cram into an apartment. But now we can get a modest office, but most importantly now we can pay ourselves and additional people for long enough to put the game out and support it in a way that makes everyone happy.

WSJ: How has it been working with Kickstarter specifically? Have you done anything extra to get the buzz out?

NW: At the very beginning we sent a press release to everyone that has a public email online, we had a few forms. We shot out an email to 250 different press outlets just trying to get traction somewhere.

SV: We didn’t do it like shotgun, we specifically talked to people that would be interested in this kind of project. If there was someone that worked on this specific type of platform, we reached out and contacted those people specifically.

IF: We sent a video to a few YouTube users, we got a huge response from that.

SV: It’s also, we’re truly excited and we can’t shut the hell up about it. That’s a little infectious — anyone that’s mildly interested in this type of game, or if you’re a young person seeing this for the first time, you get excited. We had parents and kids doing art entries together. One kid did an entire new order of knights on his own, he had write-ups and personalities.

NW: It was like you are writing your own Megaman 8 robot masters.

SV: That’s exactly what I did as a kid, I would want so badly for my creativity and excitement to be in this game world. In a large way, Megaman did that by running contests. A lot of the robot masters we know so well were created by kids. We’re inspiring creativity in people and kids.

WSJ: Any advice for others doing Kickstarter?

NW: A lot of us have asked what the successful formula is — you just have to love your product and be really passionate about it, and love your community and treat it like your family. We responded to every comment on the Kickstarter page. They called us and told us they’ve never seen a more OCD group on Kickstarter.

SV: During the Kickstarter it was all hands on deck, thinking about the Kickstarter all the time.

WSJ: Would you do it again?

IF: That’s a hard question — it depends on the project. If we had a project that fit the bill, and we want to be out there, yeah it could be useful. I wouldn’t say that we default to Kickstarter.

NW: But it was really great, the level of interaction. We now have a place where we know we can post an update. That email goes to all 15,000 backers. It’s a really neat community to develop.

WSJ: Any plans to go mobile?

NW: When we’re talking about that kind of stuff, mobile is big. Ultimately we want to support the platforms we’ve already announced. I’d like to see us go more into the PlayStation Network market and Vita. But since we’re such a small team, right now we promised it for PC, 3DS, Mac, Linux and Wii U. Those are getting priority.